In clinical medicine, physicians are faced with the challenging joint tasks of engaging with patients during exams, procedures, and diagnoses and taking detailed notes for medical records. It is well known that the performance of even well-trained professionals diminishes rapidly when multitasking. Thus, physicians typically employ a less than ideal workflow whereby they perform an exam, procedure, or diagnosis, then attempt to generate medical notes at a later time or date from memory. Unfortunately, it is also well known that human memory is imperfect, particularly in stressful and overworked environments. As such, when physicians are creating medical notes from recall, they are likely of lower quality than notes that could be created during the actual clinical event. The diminished quality of medical notes may likely lead to diminished quality of medical care.
Existing medical note systems require significant time and input from clinicians, yet they still result in suboptimal medical notes. In the most efficient existing systems, clinicians use template forms, which result in very similar notes across patients but provide little useful clinical information.
It would be advantageous to develop a medical note system that was able to automatically prepare high-quality medical notes information available in real-time during a clinical procedure, without the significant involvement of clinicians. U.S. Parent application Ser. No. 15/793,502, entitled “Automated System for Medical Video Recording and Storage” and incorporated by reference herein, discloses a system and method for automatically recording video images from a clinical procedure. U.S. application Ser. No. 15/929,035, filed on entitled “Endoscopic Video Recording System with Voice Control and Voice Annotation” and incorporated by reference herein, discloses a system and method for providing a clinician's audio annotations with video data during a clinical procedure.
In order to produce useful medical notes, it would be advantageous to employ an automated means for synthesizing data produced and recorded during a clinical procedure in accordance with. Neural networks and other related artificial intelligence systems are presently being employed for sophisticated data synthesis tasks. U.S. Pat. No. 8,428,935 to Waelti et al., which issued on Apr. 23, 2013 and is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, discloses a speech and textual analysis device incorporating a neural network for classifying and sorting speech and text data for the purpose of constructing a search and/or classification catalog.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,754,584 to Parada San Martin et al., which issued on Sep. 5, 2017 and is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, discloses a neural network feature extractor for keyword or key phrase spotting.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,456,174 to Boyle et al., which issued on Sep. 27, 2016 and is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, discloses a neural network-based video editing system for automatically editing video recorded by a plurality of video recording systems in accordance with user pre-determined, pre-recorded video editing decisions and rules.